The Starter Wife Read online

  Gracie looked at her. “Who told you that?”

  Jaden opened her eyes and looked straight at her mother. “Daddy told me,” she said. “I think on Saturday. Or Tuesday. When did I watch him get a haircut?”

  Gracie started to blink uncontrollably. Her husband had told her daughter he was leaving before he’d told her—only his wife. “Did Daddy tell you where he was going?”

  Jaden shook her head. “Daddy said it was our secret. And he gave me a dolly that pees and cries.”

  “Kind of like Mommy, huh?” Gracie asked.

  “Mommy’s joking,” Jaden said.

  “Of course Mommy’s joking,” Gracie said.

  Gracie looked around her kitchen—the Sub-Zero, stuffed with FIJI water and Plugrá butter, embodiment of the fact that they had “made it.” Gracie, who had negative interest in decorating, had spent a ridiculous amount of time getting the exact color right for the paint—green but not too green, light but not too light. The kitchen was commercial ready; all that was needed was the Folgers lady with the disturbing accent.

  Gracie steadied herself by gazing outside into her backyard, where Jaden’s plethora of plastic—buckets, shovels, dolls without hair, dolls missing eyes, dolls without limbs, tiny rakes, two construction trucks for innocent, visiting boys—had gathered like multicolored congregants on the lawn. Many of these items were scattered under Kenny’s favorite chaise where Gracie could almost make out his large outline in the particular indentation of the long pillow. If Gracie squinted, she could almost see him lying there, sleeping, a script open on his chest. If Gracie squinted hard, she could almost see him lying there, a kitchen knife embedded in his chest, his tongue poking at the corner of his mouth, his eyes open with the question, “Why?”

  “Why?” Gracie said out loud, “I’ve got one hundred reasons why!”

  “Mama, are you talking to yourself ?” Jaden, her Swedish cherub, asked, looking over at her. Gracie smiled at her, which hurt about as much as a labia wax, but Gracie remembered reading something about being brave for your children in trying times.

  “Of course not, sweetheart,” Gracie said. “Mommy was talking to her coffee mug. And you know what? It answered back. Can Mommy see you dance some more?”

  “Mommy, I love you, but I’m not a machine,” Jaden said, her eyebrows angling down toward her nose.

  “No,” Gracie said, “you’re not a machine, but Mommy’s a machine. Mommy’s like an old washer that you put out on the front lawn hoping someone will pick it up so you don’t have to make a trip to the city dump.”

  Her daughter, thankfully, had ceased to listen to her.

  Gracie sighed; she felt like there should be yellow tape around her house. Our marriage, our life, the crime scene.

  What were her options? Long-term: Find another man, find happiness, find herself. God, how awful, Gracie thought, I sound like a Woman’s Day article. Worse, I sound like a letter to Dr. Phil.

  Short term, however, Gracie knew what she needed to do: She needed to go to lunch, to go shopping, to show her face, to get dressed in her best “Look at me, I’m fine, I’m more than fine, I’m great” outfit. To laugh in the face of divorce proceedings.

  All these things she would do, right after Gracie took a nap. After all, it was now nine o’clock in the morning. Nine hours down, thousands to go. Gracie called to Ana, her housekeeper, to keep an eye on Jaden for a few minutes. She wondered who would get custody of Ana. These things, Gracie thought, are so messy for the loved ones.

  Gracie realized she had officially skipped breakfast, her first (inadvertently) skipped meal in fifteen years, and she suddenly felt better. Gracie just might come out of this divorce looking like Elle Macpherson, only shorter and without all the bothersome male attention.

  And then a thought came to Gracie, floating into her head like a mantra.

  Eat, the thought urged. Eat, it cajoled. Enjoy yourself. Stuff your face.You’ve got nothing to lose.

  The thought had a voice which sounded an awful lot like Mel Brooks.

  But no matter. The pin had been pulled. Gracie smiled, hopped off her stool, and headed for the forbidden room.

  The pantry.

  TWO SESAME BAGELS (toasted, buttered, and smothered with cream cheese) later, Gracie started to drift off to sleep. And at that moment where reality encounters dream, she thought about the other ways to tell that your husband is cheating on you.

  He starts shaving his balls.

  And it isn’t even summertime.

  And he isn’t even gay.

  Gracie’s eyes snapped open. Of course, she thought. Two weeks ago, Ana had told Gracie that Kenny’s shower drain was plugged. When Gracie looked, she saw dozens of tiny pubic hairs stuck in the drain; she checked his razor—curly hairs were clinging to the blades like refugees on a sinking raft.

  Ana had widened her eyes and raised her eyebrows and then had left Gracie alone in Kenny’s bathroom to ponder the meaning of the pube glut.

  Finally, she’d called her husband at the office.

  “Your drain is clogged,” she told him.

  “So, call a plumber,” Kenny said. “Are you meeting me tonight or are we driving together to that thing?”

  “I called a plumber,” Gracie said. “Can you tell me why you’re shaving your pubic area so I can explain it to Joe-Earle?”

  Joe-Earle was the plumber. He wore a gold socket wrench charm around his neck and talked too much about his other clients, which, while fascinating, led Gracie to believe he talked too much about them as well.

  This story should be a doozy, Gracie thought.

  “All the kids do it, it’s a kid thing,” Kenny said, “it’s called ‘mowing the lawn,’ ‘culling the herd.’ It’s, you know, cool.”

  He said this with a tone which made it clear that Gracie would not know a thing about what’s cool.

  “‘A kid thing,’” Gracie repeated. “‘It’s cool.’” The toddler volumes had taught her to repeat back certain sentences to the child, certain sentences that could be upsetting.

  “Makes your dick look bigger. Did you call Rupert Murdoch’s wife yet? I’ve got to run. Love ya.” Then he’d hung up.

  He said “ya.”

  Gracie had shaken her head. Kenny was all about staying ahead of the curve, but keeping your balls ahead of the curve could be seen as overkill. Gracie couldn’t imagine that the real power players shaved their balls—Spielberg, Katzenberg, Murdoch …

  She had wiped her mind of those images and tried to go about her day.

  But now Gracie could see, this “mowing the lawn” thing had been a sign, as clear as if Kenny had printed up bright yellow T-shirts saying I’M LEAVING YOU, SPRING 2005 in block letters.

  “BUT YOU can’t get a divorce,” Cricket sobbed when Gracie broke the news. “What’s going to happen to every third Tuesday?”

  Gracie had called together two more friends, the final components of The Coven. Kenny had bestowed Gracie’s circle with this nickname, which Gracie once thought was funny but now just viewed as rude.

  “Why,” Gracie had asked, “do you insist on calling my circle of friends The Coven?”

  “Because they hate men,” Kenny had said. “They remind me of the witches in that play.”

  “Double, double, toil and trouble? Macbeth?” Gracie had asked. “Well, at least it’s Shakespeare. I guess I should take that as a compliment.”

  “I love that you’re so smart,” Kenny had said, genuinely admiring. “You make me look good.”

  Gracie had smiled at his remark. On a scale of one-to-ten, in a two-hundred-year-old classroom at an Ivy League college, her brains were about a seven—maybe a six and a half since her daughter was born. But at a Coffee Bean on the west side of L.A., she was pushing a nine, nine and a half, easy.

  “My friends don’t hate men,” Gracie had said. “One of them is a man.”

  “Yeah, right,” Kenny had said, and snickered like an underage frat boy boozing it up at a strip club. Translati
on of Super Hetero remark? Will was that rarest of creatures, a gay interior decorator; therefore, Will was not entirely a man. Kenny was not waving a banner at the forefront of the P.C. Revolution.

  Back to Cricket, whose remarkably large green eyes were spitting tears into her grilled chicken salad, which remained otherwise untouched.

  “Apparently, I can get divorced. It’s not illegal in the United States—yet,” Gracie said. “And I’ve decided to title it: Operation Gracie’s Divorce!”

  Day 1.5, Post-Catastrophic Phone Call. Gracie, Cricket, and Will were at Barney Greengrass, the rooftop Upscale-Restaurant-Professing-to-Be-a-Deli at Barneys Beverly Hills. Gracie had wanted to go somewhere where she could see people. Well, not real people, fake people: Agent People, Writer People, Development People, Manager People, B-Level Celebrity People, Studio Executive People. A place where Gracie could put on her one Chanel suit and try out her brave face. This was a mistake. The Chanel suit had been bought a few years before her current feeding frenzy, which hadn’t abated since the double-sesame-bagel blitz, and she wound up feeling like a carpeted sausage.

  Cricket was sobbing about their monthly double date. “You and Kenny are The Perfect Marriage,” she sniffed. “Jorge and I count on you, we look up to you, you keep us in line, you’re like our Elmer’s glue!”

  “It wasn’t a perfect marriage,” Will said. “It was a mixed marriage. He’s an asshole and she’s not.”

  “Thank you,” Gracie said, reaching over to squeeze Will’s hand.

  “Now,” Will continued to Cricket, “quiet yourself. Gracie’s life is in the dumper and I want to be a supportive friend and digest every last tragic morsel.”

  Why Gracie had chosen to tell her fragile friend Cricket, wife of Jorge—you know, Jorge Stewart, the whiz kid former Green Beret who became a TV producer of the raging hybrid, legal/military dramas—in a public forum, now revealed itself to be another in a long line of strategic mistakes. Cricket, mother of three children under four, was not known for her emotional or otherwise stability. Weighing in at just over 106 pounds, with not one ounce of muscle tone, she had the physical strength of a hummingbird, combined with a mental state hovering between questionable and deeply questionable. Gracie had met Cricket in a Lamaze class; she was breast-feeding her two-year-old and pregnant with twins. Their husbands, recognizing a fellow showbiz inmate, had bonded right away. Gracie had “fallen in love” with Cricket the instant she told Gracie that Lamaze was a load of “hooey” (Cricket never swore) and that she only needed to know three words when giving birth: epidural. And: more epidural.

  And here was Will, Cricket’s opposite. “Sentiment” was not a feeling found in his emotional lexicon. He claimed he’d had all sentiment beaten out of him as a child, growing up homosexual in the California Third Reich, otherwise known as South Pasadena. His father had been a football coach at USC, his mother a member of the Junior League. He had grown up attending stadium football games every week; his favorite play was the huddle. His father had disowned him after Will seduced the quarterback, who didn’t need all that much encouragement. Will was an L.A.-phynate: Interior Decorator—Wife Of’s Best Friend. Gracie had invited Yin and Yang for lunch and was finding neither to be gratifying, spiritually or otherwise.

  “He never satisfied you,” Will said. “Let’s be frank. Speaking of which, I met a Frank the other day and I said, ‘Can I be frank?’ and he said, ‘Will you?’”

  Will sighed, “Wasn’t he the clever boy?”

  “Do you think we’re next?” Cricket sniffed again.

  “Cricket,” Gracie said, “you can’t actually ‘catch’ divorce.”

  Cricket looked at her, pained. “Did you hear Nick Cage got married again? To a young Asian waitress.”

  “Asian is the new black,” Will said.

  “Let’s stick to my own car wreck of a life,” Gracie said.

  People were starting to stare. A few of the overgroomed seemed to be pointing their manicured fingers in the direction of the sobbing peroxide blonde, her Chanel-clad friend with the strained seams and expression, and the boyish fellow with the careful highlights. This in a town where no one would blink an eye if a building were to blow up in front of them—a fatalistic town where disaster was waiting behind every headline in Variety and behind every corner, just to the right of the Polo store.

  “You need to talk to my psychopharmacologist,” Cricket said, taking a business card from her Balenciaga. “You should start off with Klonopin—it’s strong, but under these circumstances, Wellbutrin is useless—”

  “Wellbutrin?” Will said. “You can’t smoke with Wellbutrin!”

  “Gracie’s not a smoker!” Cricket yelled. “Gracie, you haven’t started smoking again? You know it’s bad for babies!” Cricket was the type of mother who made hot lunches and never let another soul put her children to sleep; she was a wonderful, caring mother.Who would someday have to be institutionalized.

  “Don’t scream,” Will hissed at Cricket. “You get all wrinkled when you scream.”

  “Use your church voices,” Gracie said. “I don’t want to be wading in the gossip pool.” She said this even though she knew the news of her impending divorce was nearing the deep end of the rumor-ridden waters.

  “No one’s heard about your terrible breakup!” Cricket honked and assured her, placing her pale, younger-than-her hand on Gracie’s. Gracie noted her friend’s lack of freckling; Gracie noted the wedding ring. Gracie stiffened. What was Gracie supposed to do with her damned ring? She had taken off her diamond engagement ring, but she couldn’t return it—wasn’t there a statute of limitations on engagement ring returns?

  Like the Buddhist dilettante Gracie longed to be, she tried to find the positive in the moment. So she congratulated herself on not devouring the entire passel of breadsticks that came to the table. Although Gracie had eaten nonstop in the last day and a half, the divorce diet was still working. Why, Gracie had shed 190 pounds of ugly fat in less than a day! One ninety-five, fully clothed and sopping wet, holding Ray-Ban sunglasses in one hand and a script in the other.

  She grabbed the last two breadsticks and ate them.

  “Gracie, maybe I shouldn’t bring this up, but now’s as good a time as any,” Cricket said. “There’s a whole new world out there, and I want to talk to you about labial rejuvenation.”

  “CHECK!” Will screamed.

  “I’m trying to save her marriage!” Cricket said. And then, in hushed tones, “I’m thinking about doing it myself. I heard Courtney Love did it. I hear her vagina looks like a rosebud.”

  Will put his head in his hands; Gracie was afraid he would start sobbing.

  And then Cricket said quietly, “My waxer, Janusz, told me …” She pointed to her Dolce’d crotch.

  Her voice choked up. Gracie handed her a glass of water.

  “Is this FIJI?” Cricket asked before she drank.

  “For God’s sake, what did Janusz say about your …” Will said, then waved his hand down there.

  “He said …” Cricket hesitated. “He said …” she continued in a voice that sounded somewhere between Gorbachev (remember him?) and the guy who pumped Gracie’s gas, “‘she-a looks like-a Dumbo.’”

  Will looked at her, aghast. “The very best argument for male homosexuality,” he finally said.

  “I don’t care what Redbook says,” Cricket said. “The vagina is never the same after having kids—”

  “Mom!” Will said to Gracie, “Cricket’s reading Redbook!”

  “Back to the topic at hand,” Gracie said, herding the strands of conversation like errant sheep. “Cricket, it’s really important to me that you keep this to yourself. No one else can know about this. It’s entirely possible that Kenny and I can work this all out.” For now, Gracie thought she should stick to the abridged “Kenny and Gracie Divorce Story”—the Reader’s Digest version.

  “Your alarm clock’s ringing,” Will said helpfully. “Wake up. Kenny and I have a better chance of exchanging
vows at the Bel Air, giving birth to five biracial puppies, and working out our marital issues than Kenny and you.”

  Gracie snapped Will in the arm with her knuckle while Cricket zipped her collagened upper lip, the one her husband thought was hers and hers alone, though mysterious bruises appeared on them every three months. “Your secret is safe with me,” she whispered at Broadway-stage levels. “I won’t tell a soul!”

  “IS IT TRUE?” Sharon Adler, wife of Kenny’s business attorney, Mervin, widened her already preternaturally wide eyes at Gracie—wider even in the last year because of the Brentwood essential, thirty-eight-years-and-counting eye lift. If they were any wider, Gracie would be looking at the back of her head. Moments like these made Gracie wonder why she bothered with mascara. How could one compete by using the usual, pedestrian eye-widening tools?

  Gracie was picking Jaden up from her preschool class at Tiny Miracles, the nursery school Kenny insisted Jaden attend even though the class interfered with her naptime. The place was indeed tiny, with a dirt yard spotted with tufts of dying grass that was barely big enough to accommodate five or six children, much less the fifteen connected kids in her class. Worse, it stood next to a dry cleaner that had steadfastly refused to use environmentally safe cleaning agents. Smoke billowed out from the top of the square, windowless concrete building, forming perc clouds over the preschoolers playing in dirty sand with the school mascot, the nursery founder’s ancient, ornery rabbit.

  So why attend? Kenny and Gracie had come to this school for a tour when Jaden was barely three months old. Kenny had immediately scoured the room for the presence of excellent trade placement; he was looking for anyone who would warrant a front-page story in the Daily Variety or Hollywood Reporter. Kenny wanted Jaden to be at a school where he could schmooze. If there was no schmooze factor at the school—for example, if the parents were mostly in finance rather than entertainment—well, then, Kenny couldn’t be bothered.

  Tiny Miracles’ schmooze factor was off the charts. In Jaden’s class alone, there was an Oscar-winning director’s child, an action-producer’s child, and most important, a movie star’s child. Who did Jaden prefer to hang out with? The scholarship child, the daughter of a local housekeeper. Gracie called it Divine Social Justice; Kenny called it annoying and grumbled at every check they wrote out to Tiny Miracles, as though the schmooze factor should have made the tuition tax deductible.